DOUGLAS PRESTON & LINCOLN CHILD – The Lost Island. Grand Central, hardcover, 2014; paperback, March 2015.

   Between them, the pair of authors Preston and Child have written and co-written a list of titles that fills a page, just before the title page. I’ve always meant to read one, and now I finally have. All things considered, I may not have picked the best one to start with.

   To begin with, while Preston and Child are best known for their series of books about someone called Pendergast, this is the third in a new series featuring an adventurer named Gideon Crew. It doesn’t matter so much that this is the third one; it’s that when this one ends Gideon is ready to continue the adventure right into the fourth one. I always hate that when it happens.

   But even worse is that this gets more and more uninteresting as the book goes on. I hate it even more when that happens. It begins with Gideon stealing a page from the Book of Kells from its state-of-the-art guarded case in Manhattan museum, one of the most audacious ventures I can imagine you can imagine, and it continues on with Gideon’s employer chemically removing the hand-colored print from the page, completely destroying it.

   The madness behind this action? A treasure map, one not leading to gold or other sundry valuables, but a secret with all-but-magical healing powers. And off Gideon goes to find it, discovering as he does so that he is retracing steps taken by others before him in the realm of Greek mythology.

   But with rather ordinary obstacles along the way: treasure-hunting pirates, a shipwreck, a unknown tribe of natives who believe in human sacrifice — each of step the way turning disaster into just coincidentally one step further in the right direction.

   The final obstacle is not so ordinary, but by that time the pedestrian writing and less than compelling dialogue had me caught in a bind. I’d spent a lot of time getting to that point myself. Should I give up, or try to redeem my input to this point and garner whatever output I could get? I tossed a mental coin and I went on, and while I’m glad I did, I probably made the wrong decision.

   In my opinion, as far as this book is concerned — I certainly can’t vouch for their earlier work — I think Preston and Child are writing for young adults. I’d state that as a fact if it weren’t for all of the bloody meaningless deaths that occur, especially toward the end of the book. Of course maybe that’s what young adults are reading these days, instead of the Hardy Boys and their motorcycle and roadster. I have to admit that that is something I just don’t know.

THE SKULL. Amicus Productions / Paramount Pictures, 1965. Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Patrick Wymark, Jill Bennett, Nigel Green. Screenplay by Milton Subotsky, also co-producer, based on the short story “The Skull of the Marquis de Sade,” by Robert Bloch (Weird Tales, September 1945). Director: Freddie Francis.

   A reasonably good job was done in adapting Robert Bloch’s short story to the screen, but at 83 minutes long, it’s at least a half hour longer than it needs to be. And for a movie to be scary, it certainly doesn’t bode well when a sizable chunk of it can be cut out with nothing being noticed.

   But it’s always good to see Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in a movie together, no doubt about that. This time around, Cushing plays a collector of occult and inhuman items who is offered an absolutely unique item, the skull of the notorious Marquis de Sade, while Lee is it’s previous owner — who most definitely does NOT want it back. He is more than happy it was stolen from him.

   Better, though, than either of these two actors in their respective roles is Patrick Wymark as Marco, the unctuous middleman (or thief) in the sale of the skull to Cushing. His death, a dramatic fall down a stairwell through several panes of colored glass, was for me a highlight of the film. That was also the turning point for me. The movie simply ran out of steam from that scene on.

   On hand is plenty of scary music, flashing lights and moonlight, and a skull mysteriously floating in the air, but none of these are of any avail when the story itself doesn’t make sense. Horror is a state of mind, and there have to be rules that have to followed, even in terms of the supernatural, not so?

   Read the story (follow the link provided). It’s only six pages long, and in those six pages it packs up to 20 or 30 times the punch of this highly acclaimed but in the end not entirely convincing horror film.

MILTON LOTT – Backtrack. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover,, 1965. Berkley F1472, paperback, 1967.

   I mentioned Milton Lott before in these pages (he wrote The Last Hunt, 1954) but I’ve never been able to find out much about him except that he died in 1996 at age 80 after turning out only three books. I haven’t read Dance Back the Buffalo (1959) but based on The Last Hunt and this one, I wish he’d done a lot more.

   Backtrack is a woolly thing, set in Texas around 1879 but darting one way, then another, like a horse that won’t be saddled, never settling down to one theme, but never losing momentum or a sense of purpose either. The narrator is a cowboy (literally, he makes his living herding cattle) who meets up with a very strange and troubled youth in the course of a cattle drive. When the kid (now known as “the Kid”) kills 2 men and lights out, he goes after him to tell him he’s not in trouble with the law — and to sort of look after him, since the kid seems too weird to last long without a keeper.

   But….

   The narrator himself (called “Ringo” for a wound he suffered trying to take a dump on a hot pot) has hang-ups of his own. Though he seems gentle enough, he has a reputation as a killer, and suffers from what we now call Repressed Memories: odd flashbacks he can’t put together that warp his judgment at times. And as he follows the kid’s trail, it leads him back to his childhood home and confrontation with his past.

   This would have been enough for a fine Western all by itself, but Lott never loses sight of his narrative peg for very long, and as Ringo struggles with his identity, the Kid picks up a reputation of his own, two gunmen on his trail, and the idea that Ringo is after him to kill him.

   What could have been hopelessly over-complicated at a lesser typewriter flows with natural grace from Lott. Backtrack teems with energy and inventiveness that are a real pleasure to read, evoking the dusty trail, the grinding work of the cowboy, and hair-raising encounters with man & beast, including a medicine show huckster who seems to have stepped out of Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show.

   There’s a really really clever confrontation between a gunfighter and a sleight-of-hand artist (“I couldn’t see any gun on him, but he didn’t look like he’d take long to find one.”) and a splendid moment when a cowboy dodging a night-stampede climbs a tree for safety and sees his saddle climb the tree too.

   To appreciate that last bit you’ll have to read the book. And I recommend you do.

JOE R. LANSDALE – Sunset and Sawdust. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 2004. Vintage, trade paperback, 2005.

   It begins as a tornado hits the home of Sunset Jones and her husband Pete, and it ends soon after a gigantic swarm of ground-clearing locusts hits the small East Texas sawmill town of Camp Rapture. The country is in the midst of the Depression, and Pete, the town’s constable, does not survive the house-leveling storm. While he is raping Sunset, she pulls his gun from his holster and shoots him clean through the head.

   There are quite a few places in this book where I simply had to stop and say to myself “Wow!” or “Oh, my!” and this is only the first of them. The second is a little more subtle – Sunset’s mother-in-law, having gone through the same wife-beating routine with Pete’s daddy, sticks up for her, even so far as convincing the locals that Sunset would make a fine replacement for Pete as the town’s law enforcement officer. (She is the co-owner of the sawmill, after all.)

   What does Sunset know about police work? Very little, but with the of two deputies, both of whom are either in love or unrequited lust with her, she starts right in – and makes enemies right and left. Uppity is hardly the word for Sunset. As far as Camp Rapture is concerned, she has three strikes against her. She shot her husband. She’s a woman doing a man’s job. She sided with a black man who killed the sheriff the next town over, not that that worked out very well.

   This is not your ordinary detective puzzle mystery, although there is one to be solved. There are times when Lansdale verges into Stephen King territory, or perhaps this is the result that would occur if Mr. King were to verge into Mr. Lansdale’s East Texas venue, with some of the scariest villains you will never read about in your everyday straight-laced Perry Mason courtroom drama.

   What you will discover, were you to decide to read this book, is that once started, you will never know which direction it will go next. Staid and sedate is not Joe R. Lansdale’s forte, and you will never find a better example than this.

IRON MAN. Universal International, 1951. Jeff Chandler, Evelyn Keyes, Stephen McNally, Rock Hudson, Joyce Holden, Jim Backus, Jim Arness. Based on the novel by W. R. Burnett (1930). Director: Joseph Pevney.

   During his film career, Jeff Chandler portrayed a wide array of diverse and exotic characters. These include a Jewish resistance leader in Palestine, Cochise, a Bedouin horseman, and U.S. Army general.

   Add boxer to that list.

   In Iron Man, a 1951 remake of a Tod Browning film of the same name, Chandler portrays Coke Mason, a coal miner who takes up professional boxing. But he’s not just any run of the mill pugilist. No. Coke Mason is an emotionally immature, mad dog consumed with unbridled rage. He’s type of boxer who fights dirty, one whom the gawking crowds just love to hate. He’s the eponymous “Iron Man.”

   Coke’s not a particularly easy character to like, but then again he’s not designed to be. That is, until we realize what’s motivating him and who’s taking financial advantage of his clumsy, but deadly, boxing abilities. To that extent, Iron Man is as much a criticism of professional boxing as it is a character study of a flawed, albeit all too human, man who finds himself betrayed and manipulated by those he most trusted.

   Directed by Joseph Pevney, Iron Man at times feels a little too much like a soap opera. The film hints at the dark side of human nature, but never satisfactorily explores it. Forget the black and white cinematography and the doomed protagonist; this is not a crime film or a film noir. It’s merely an average, although perfectly entertaining, 1950s sports film.

   While Chandler is less convincing as a boxer when in the ring, he’s quite good at portraying the emotional tumult of an intellectually ambitious, but professionally limited man still scarred from a tough childhood in a bleak coal mining town. Look for a youthful Rock Hudson as Speed O’Keefe, Coke’s sparring partner turned rival, who becomes an agent of change for the title character.

   As to whether the Chandler-Hudson boxing match is believable or not, I will defer judgment to those more familiar with boxing and with boxing films.

WIRT VAN ARSDALE – The Professor Knits a Shroud. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1951.

   Pedro Jose Maria Guadaloupe O’Reilly y Apodaca, B.S., M.A., Ph.D., more familiarly and shortly known as Peter or Uncle Pete, is a professor of anthropology, not, as Doubleoday’s dust jacket would have it, archaeology. The young lady to whom he is a former guardian invites him, somewhat to the displeasure of her husband even though he usually enjoys Uncle Pete’s company, to their farm, presently occupied by Henri Von Fliegel, a best-selling author.

   Apodaca describes Von Fliegel’s books this way: …Oh, he had good story ideas. That I will grant you. But then he’d take those good ideas and embellish them with all sorts of impossible characters and impossible situations and throw in a lot of cheap sentimentality and as much fornication as he thought he could get by with and call the whole nauseating mess a novel…

   Ah, how the literary world has progressed since the 1950s.

   But I digress.

   As is usual with successful authors — though only in fiction, one hopes — Von Fliegel is loathed by almost everyone, and apparently with good reason. As is to be expected, he comes to no good end, shot in the head while working on his current novel.

   Luckily, Professor Apodaca’s experience in anthropological fie!d work leads him to make some sterling deductions, and these convince the police that he should be part of the investigation. He solves the case, to the appreciation of almost all concerned. As an aid to his cerebration, the professor knits socks. At last count, he had completed 2,736 individual ones, I believe, not pairs.

   The only unbelievable item in the novel, if one accepts the sock count, is Apodaca’s inability to recall for a lengthy period where he had read about the word rache written in blood. There are well-read people who wouldn’t immediate|y know that, but what are they doing detecting in mystery novels?

   Wirt Van Arsdale, a pseudonym of Martha Wirt Davis, wrote only one mystery. A pity, for Van Arsdale showed lots of promise in this book. Of course, you have to accept the usual caveat that people act unreasonably for purposes of the plot in this bib!io mystery.

Bio-Bibliographic Notes: As Bill points out, this was Martha Wirt Davis’s only work of detective fiction. She may have written others if not for her untimely death in 1952, at the age of 46. She was married to author and occasional pulp fiction writer Clyde Brion Davis, who died in 1962. According to Wikipedia, their son, David Brion Davis, is an “American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world.”

ROGER ZELAZNY – A Night in the Lonesome October. William Morrow, hardcover, 1993; paperback, 1994. Chicago Review Press,softcover, 2014. Illustrated by Gahan Wilson.

   If I were to play the “one author for a desert island” game with science fiction, Roger Zelazny would certainly be one of the finalists, and several of his books would find their way onto any 100 best list I made.

   Most critical opinion would have it that his work has been essentially trivial for the last decade, or longer. I wouldn’t argue the point, but would argue that even trivial Zelazny is of a quality of readability matched by relatively few writing in the field today.

   This is about a diverse group of characters who gather in England for a recurring contest between two factions: one who wants to open a gate so that the Elder Gods can return, one who wants to bar it. The tale is told from the viewpoint of the familiar of one of the “closers,” a dog (of a sort) named Snuff. Without giving away too much of the plot, I’ll simply say that many of the players will be familiar.

   This is very much a Zelazny book in terms of style and obscurity, and by obscurity I mean that he never tells you as much about the characters and setting as you’d like to Know. Wilson’s many illustrations are as appealingly macabre as you’d expect, and add greatly to the book.

   This isn’t a work of substance. However, it’s pleasant if ephemeral, and it’s Zelazny, and that’ll do in a pinch.

From researcher John Herrington:

    “I have some questions to ask about an author who is proving hard to reliably track down. Alice Hosken who wrote as Coralie Stanton, author of many “sensational novels,”, several of which are in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV. [See below.]

    “The trouble is I can only find two records for her. In 1901 she married Ernest Hosken as Mary Alice Cecil Seymour Keay — I have a copy of her marriage certificate which says she was 24 and the daughter of John Seymour Keay, banker (and MP in the early 1890s). But no such birth found c1877 (which is given in her entry on the 1911 census which says born London).

    “I have looked at John Seymour Keay and found a few facts. He was Scottish born in 1839 and spent many years working in India, returning permanently here in 1880. He married, in October 1878 in London, Christina (known as Nina) Jameson Vivian, daughter of an Englishman who was then living in Australia where he died in 1880.

    “Nina died in in 1885 and is known to have been the mother of his two daughters – Nina born India in 1880 and Gladys born England in 1881. – with no mention of Alice. In fact when he died in 1909, a newspaper article on his will says he left everything to his two daughters, Nina and Gladys.

    “So no mention of a third daughter (a son was born and died in 1885). So if the Keay connection is correct, was she born out of wedlock? Keay is on the 1881 census with his wife and daughter Nina, and I have found no mention of a Mary or Alice Keay on that census who fits. As I said, the only two definite records for her are the 1901 marriage and the 1911 census.

    “I have no idea how long Keay was in England before his marriage, though he returns to England afterwards. I suppose it’s possible there was another marriage in India, that when that marriage ended his wife kept the child and either remarried or retained her maiden name?

    “So her origins are at present a complete mystery. As too is her death, though she could be the Alice S Hosken who died in 1951.

    “Sorry to go into so much detail, but Keay’s story is necessary to illustrate the mystery surrounding Alice.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY:        [taken from Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV]

The Adventuress (McBride, 1907, hc) See: Miriam Lemaire, Money Lender (Cassell 1906) as by Coralie Stanton & Heath Hosken.
The Amateur Adventuress (Thomson, 1930, hc) [England]
Called to Judgment (with Heath Hosken) (Paul, 1913, hc) [England]
-Chance the Juggler (with Heath Hosken) (Hutchinson, 1904, hc) [England]
The Dog Star (with Heath Hosken) (Cassell, 1913, hc)
-Her Fugitive (Thomson, 1929, pb) [England]
Ironmouth (Paul, 1916, hc) [England]
The Love That Kills (with Heath Hosken) (Milne, 1909, hc) [England]
The Man Made Law (with Heath Hosken) (Everett, 1908, hc) [England]
Miriam Lemaire, Money Lender (with Heath Hosken) (Cassell, 1906, hc) [Miriam Lemaire; England] U.S. title: The Adventuress. McBride, 1907, as by Coralie Stanton.
The Muzzled Ox (with Heath Hosken) (Paul, 1911, hc)
-The Revelations of a Rich Wife (with Heath Hosken) (Nash, 1921, hc) [England]
The Second Best (with Heath Hosken) (Long, 1907, hc) [England]
The Sinners’ Syndicate (with Heath Hosken) (Hurst, 1907, hc) [England]
-The Way of Escape (Leng, 1932, hc)
The White Horsemen (with Heath Hosken) (Nash, 1924, hc)
-Zoe: A Woman’s Last Card (with Heath Hosken) (Everett, 1913, hc) [England]

   I own very few European crime novels in both their original language and in English, but one of those is Der Richter und Sein Henker or, as it’s known over here, The Judge and His Hangman (1952; U.S. edition 1955), the first novel of Swiss playwright Friedrich Duerrenmatt (1921-1990).

   I read it in both languages many years ago and again last month. It’s about Hans Bärlach (whose last name in English is missing the umlaut), Kommissär of the Swiss police, a man clearly near death, and his 40-year-long struggle against a sort of existential criminal who committed a motiveless murder in front of the Kommissär’s eyes and dared Bärlach to pin it on him.

   More than sixty years after its first publication the book is still a compelling read, and the German edition (designed for students who are learning the language) adds several dimensions to what readers of the translation are offered, including two maps that make clear the relationship to each other of the various small towns near Bern where much of the story takes place.

   Reading the German side by side with Therese Pol’s English version also reveals where Pol now and then goes her own way. At the end of Chapter 11 (Chapter 8 in the translation), the diabolical Gastmann breaks into Bärlach’s house beside the Aare River and steals the Kommissär’s file on him. “I’m sure you have no copies or photostats. I know you too well, you don’t operate that way.”

   A procedural this novel ain’t. He throws a knife at Bärlach, just missing him, and goes his way. “The old man crept about the room like a wounded animal, floundering across the rug on his hands and knees…, his body covered with a cold sweat.” He moans softly in German: “Was ist der Mensch? Was ist der Mensch?” This simply means “What is man? What is man?” but Therese Pol expands it to: “What sort of animal is man? What sort of animal?”

   That’s not too much of a stretch compared with the last chapter where Bärlach learns that his young assistant Tschanz “sei zwischen Ligerz und Twann unter seinem von Zug erfassten Wagen tot aufgefunden worden,” meaning that between two of the villages shown on the first map he was found dead under his car, which had been struck by a train.

   In English the report is simply “that Tschanz had been found dead under his wrecked car….” The train has vanished, but at least Ms. Pol doesn’t make up Duerrenmatt’s mind for him on whether Tschanz’s death was an accident or suicide. Such are the joys of reading a book in two languages at once. If only my French were good enough to allow me to read Simenon in his own tongue!

   You don’t need to be a linguist to catch some amazing blunders in the versions of Simenon that we get to see. In L’Affaire Saint-Fiacre, first published in French in 1931 and first translated by Margaret Ludwig as The Saint-Fiacre Affair in the double volume Maigret Keeps a Rendezvous (1941), a threat on the life of a countess brings Maigret back to the village where he was born and raised.

   Very early in the morning he wakes up in the village inn and, purely for professional reasons, gets ready to attend Mass in the church where he’d been an altar boy. He goes downstairs and, in one of the later translations, the innkeeper asks him: “Are you going to communicate?” Even one who knows no French and nothing of Catholicism should be able to render the question in English better than that.

   I don’t remember the title of the novel or who translated it but I vividly recall another Simenon where Maigret wakes up in yet another country inn and phones down for, as he puts it in English, “my little lunch.” Again, you don’t need to know more than a soupçon of French to figure out what the translation of petit déjeuner should be.

   As this column is being cobbled together I’m in the middle of going over The John Dickson Carr Companion. And learning some odd trivia about Carr’s novels and stories that had never struck me before. How many of you remember that in the Carter Dickson novel She Died a Lady a gardener claims that on the previous night he went to see the movie Quo Vadis? The book was published in 1943 but, according to the Companion, its events take place in 1940.

   Either way, Carr certainly couldn’t have been referring to the Quo Vadis? that we remember today if we remember the title at all, the 1951 Biblical spectacular that starred Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr. There was a German silent version of the same story, released in 1924 and starring Emil Jannings, but what would a German silent be doing playing in England long after silents had been displaced by talkies and at a time when England and Germany were at war? More important question: What was Carr thinking?

   The adaptations of Carr’s work dating back to the golden age of live TV drama back in the Fifties are not covered in the Companion, at least not in any detail. I happen to have some information on that subject, and chance has now given me an excuse to share it. Anyone remember Danger?

   It was a 30-minute anthology of live teledramas, broadcast on CBS for five seasons (1950-55). My parents hadn’t yet bought their first set when the series began, and when it went off the air I was a child of 12 who hadn’t yet even discovered Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan at my local library.

   I don’t think I ever watched the program, certainly not with any regularity, but I vaguely remember that one of its shticks was a background score of solo guitar music played by a guy named Tony Mottola (1918-2004). Obviously the producers of the show were hoping to duplicate the success of the CBS radio and TV classic Suspense, and the two Carr tales that were broadcast on Danger happened to be radio plays that he had written for Suspense back in the Forties. “Charles Markham, Antique Dealer” (January 2, 1951), was based on the radio play “Mr. Markham, Antique Dealer” (Suspense, May 1, 1943) and starred Jerome Thor, Marianne Stewart and Richard Fraser.

   The director was Ted Post (1918-2013), who later moved into filmed TV series like Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel and Rawhide and, thanks to impressing Clint Eastwood with his Rawhide work, got hired to direct big-budget Eastwood features like Hang ’em High (1968) and Magnum Force (1973).

   We don’t know who directed “Will You Walk Into My Parlor?” (February 27, 1951) but it came from Carr’s radio drama of the same name (Suspense, February 23, 1943). The script was first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1945, and collected in Dr. Fell, Detective and Other Stories (1947) and, after Carr’s death, in The Dead Sleep Lightly (1983).

   The cast was headed by Geraldine Brooks, Joseph Anthony and Laurence Hugo. Among the other top-rank mystery writers whose stories were adapted for Danger were Philip MacDonald, Wilbur Daniel Steele, A.H.Z. Carr, Anthony Boucher, MacKinlay Kantor, Steve Fisher, Q. Patrick, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler and Roald Dahl.

   The roster of authors who scripted original teleplays for the series included Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose and Rod Serling, and among the directors who rose from this and other live teledramas to Hollywood household-name status were John Frankenheimer and Sidney Lumet.

   The final episode of Danger was a live version of Daphne DuMaurier’s 1952 short story “The Birds,” which Alfred Hitchcock later adapted into one of his best-known films. I can’t imagine anything like Hitchcock’s bird effects being possible on live TV, but either I was watching something else on the night of May 31, 1955 or I went to bed early. If anything from this series is available on DVD, I haven’t heard of it.

   Considering the dozens of scripts Carr wrote for Suspense as a radio series, one might have expected a pile of his radio scripts and short stories to have been used when the program became a staple item on prime-time TV.

   In fact only one of his radio dramas and one of his short tales were adapted for the small screen. Among the earliest of the TV show’s episodes was “Cabin B-13″ (March 16, 1949), which starred Charles Korvin and Eleanor Lynn and was based on perhaps the best known and most successful Carr radio drama, first heard on Suspense on May 25, 1943 and collected in The Door to Doom and Other Detections (1980).

   The second and final Carr contribution to Suspense was “The Adventure of the Black Baronet” (May 26, 1953), an adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes story written by Carr in collaboration with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s son Adrian (who according to Douglas G. Greene’s Carr biography did most of the writing) and first published in Collier’s for May 23, 1953, just a few days before the televersion.

   As might have been expected, Basil Rathbone reprised his movie and radio role as Holmes. It might also have been expected that Nigel Bruce would have played Dr. Watson as he had so many times in the movies and on radio. I don’t know why he didn’t, but since he died only a few months later (October 8, 1953), the reason might have had to do with his health. In any event the Watson of this Suspense episode was played by Martyn Green of Gilbert & Sullivan fame.

   As far as I’ve been able to find, Carr’s contributions to 30-minute live TV drama are limited to these four episodes. If any of his short stories or radio plays became the bases of filmed 30-minute dramas, I haven’t found them. There are two fairly well-known teledramas at greater than 30-minute length that owe their origins to Carr, but this column is long enough already so I’ll save them for next time.

RACE WITH THE DEVIL. 20th Century Fox, 1975. Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Loretta Swit, Lara Parker, R. G. Armstrong, Clay Tanner. Director: Jack Starrett.

   Imagine it’s the mid-1970s. You’re not a hippie or a rebel, though you like your motorcycles and a drink or two. You’re planning the most kick ass vacation possible. You’ve got your wife, your best friend, his wife, her cute little dog all comfortably ensconced in a souped–up RV and you’re ready to hit the wide open American road. Freedom is in the air.

   What could possibly go wrong?

   In Race With The Devil, the answer is everything. But not in a comedic National Lampoon’s Vacation manner. There’s no John Hughes comedic sensibility in this suspenseful, disturbing, but compulsively watchable, thriller about two couples on the run from a horde of bloodthirsty Satanists.

   A nightmarish journey into fear and paranoia, Race With The Devil stars Warren Oates and Peter Fonda as two buddies who, along with their wives, run afoul of a mysterious cult. Both men, actors whose work I greatly admire, are naturals here. Their distinct personalities shine through, giving life to their upper middle class characters. They are men caught between their bourgeois, consumerist lifestyle and their visceral desire to protect their women and to fight back.

   Directed by Jack Starrett, the movie has two strong leads, some bang up car chases, and a cynical eye toward both authority figures and the counterculture. The plot strains credulity, but it’s easily forgivable. After all, this isn’t high art. It’s an exploitation film about normally dressed Satanists chasing two middle class American couples through West Texas, shattering their planned ski vacation in Aspen. It’s a hell of a ride, spiraling ever downward into a neo-noir landscape where you have no idea whom you can trust.